Considering the USA

The country is so large and varied that a lifetime of visits would hardly exhaust its potentials; the USA is more a continent than the kind of country found in Europe.

WHY CONSIDER GOING TO THE USA?

The appeal of the United States is as varied as the country is vast. Millions have traditionally gone there to settle down. Nowadays more and more people visit the USA whether on holiday, to visit family or friends, on business or to study, as the jumbo jets ply backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. For many people a particular visit has been greatly enhanced by combining a business trip with a holiday, a family reunion with travelling around, or using an initial holiday as the way to sample American life before making a commitment to stay longer. The country is so large and varied that a lifetime of visits would hardly exhaust its potentials; the USA is more a continent than the kind of country found in Europe.

British associations

The British have a long association with the United States. The eastern (Atlantic) coast states were once British colonies, though they broke away from the empire in the late eighteenth century.

English is still the main language, long since adopted as America’s own. The initial settlers of the north-eastern States were English Puritans (and the states they founded are still together called New England). English and Welsh Quakers founded Pennsylvania further down the coast. Inland the mountains were first settled by Ulster folk tired of defending Ireland for the Crown. In the south the English landowners and Scots soldiers, pioneers and convicts laid the foundation of a distinctively Anglo-Saxon, almost pro-British society, but one quite unlike that back in Europe, for here a plantation economy was directly based upon the labour of African slaves.

European immigrants

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were essentially English gentlemen in rebellion, paradoxically, to protect their English rights against a despotic government far away in Britain. To the west their descendants carved out an empire dedicated to individual freedom, corporate growth and the Protestant work ethic, sweeping aside the native societies (and most other European settlers). When millions of Europeans then arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, not at first speaking English, a nation based firmly upon American experience was already in place, echoing only faintly its British origins. These immigrants created an urban and industrial society almost obliterating the rural British landscape and so recasting the language and the political system that the links with Britain became even more obscured. Even as immigrants learned in school that their new country spoke English and used the common law, their numbers and the needs of their new surroundings brought about a continual reworking of vocabulary and syntax, whilst their strident demands for action and protection recast both the legal and government systems. The British link became ever more submerged: the United States becomes ever more foreign.

A shared language

The British and the Irish, alone amongst Europeans, are uniquely able to ignore the foreignness of America if they choose to do so. Though America remains a very distant foreign country whose ethnic variety is today more firmly rooted in Africa or eastern Europe than in Britain or Ireland, the shared language opens up the USA to English-speaking Europeans as for no others from the Old World. Add the considerable number of such people with friends and family already in America and the British and Irish can retain their links with the USA even while the USA at large looks elsewhere, particularly today across the Pacific.

A familiar place

Even as the USA nowadays looks far beyond Britain and Ireland the British and Irish look ever more avidly at the USA. Hollywood movies first brought the rich variety of US life across the Atlantic. Today television and the web continue that tradition. The very quantity of TV movies, documentaries and situation comedies brings both fantasy and daily life into everyone’s homes. The USA is a country we visit passively every day, year in, year out. No wonder it often seems more familiar than even unvisited parts of our country, and beckons with the promise of exotic parts where the locals reassuringly speak English. The educated and skilled middle classes already speaking English can consider settling down in the USA, melting into the background as quickly or as slowly as they want, like East German refugees did in West Germany; no language barriers to put off all but the most stout-hearted as happens when the French and German middle classes look across the Atlantic. No wonder it is to the USA that so many British people turn for holidays, business, or to start a new life.

THERE’S SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE IN AMERICA

This may sound like little more than an ad man’s copy, like a Texan boast, or just a piece of wishful thinking. The size, the physical contrast, the ethnic variety, the particular rural-urban mix, the wealth and poverty and 400 years of European history (resting upon thousands of years of earlier people’s!) means that whatever your interest, from landscape painting to railway trains, from ornithology to folk music, there is indeed something for everyone. And millions of British people have families over there, sisters and aunts who went over as GI brides in the 1940s, brain drain scientists from the days of the space race, software designers from the dot.com boom.

It’s amazing how many people have never visited their families in the USA but have always thought they’d like to, always able to find a ‘reason’ for not going.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT...?

I haven’t the time
Well, save up your annual leave. Most of us now get two weeks, and three can usually be arranged if planned far enough ahead.

I couldn’t afford the money
It ’s not all the QE2, caviare and dressing for dinner now. Wide-bodied jets fly across in eight hours for only a couple of hundred pounds if you can book a month or so in advance.

They’ve never asked me over
They probably did years ago, or thought they did. Why not ask if they’d like to come visit you? That would get the ball rolling!

I don’t like all that violence we see on TV
Though Washington DC is more violent than Belfast ever was, most visitors never see anything more violent than a repeat episode of Morse on American TV. If you are sensible and are staying with family or friends, visiting the USA is less dangerous than staying at home. And US sports crowds are almost universally very well behaved!

I couldn’t stand all the junk food
Fast food isn’t the only food the US is famous for. Every kind under the sun is available (even fish and chips, from equipment made in Britain!). This is hardly surprising given all the different people (from Albanians to Vietnamese) who have settled there over the years.

I wouldn’t like the heat
The US has taken central heating in winter and air conditioning in summer to its heart. You need only be hot (or cold) if you want to.

I hate motorway travel
Well fly, or take the train (yes, long-distance trains still connect the main cities with some degree of civilisation). Also, believe it or not, driving an airconditioned mid-size hired car can be almost relaxing at a continuous 60 mph over the gently graded freeways of the south and west, with a comfortable motel at the day’s end (including a swim in the pool followed by a steak supper and a film on the TV movie channel in your room).

NO RELATIVES IN THE USA?

Well find some!
Didn’t a cousin go over, marry and stay? Now’s the chance to visit that aunt you’ve not seen since Christmas 1993 to ask her about her daughter in Seattle. Doesn’t someone have a US penfriend from days in the Scouts?

Old school friends?
Check out Friends Reunited and find who’s gone abroad. An old school friend now in Alberta would give you somewhere to aim for as you drive westwards from Chicago. A trip just across the border would be quite interesting, and a worthwhile detour en route for Seattle!

Ask around...
for people at school, college, work or sports club who have been to the USA. They may have US friends who keep open house to visiting stamp collectors, squash players, local historians, bird watchers and so on. How would you respond if an American couple who shared your passion for bees or real ale wrote saying they were passing through your area on their next holiday? Wouldn’t you get the spare room ready and take the risk of inviting in strangers on the basis of a mutual friend and a shared hobby?

Ask at your school, college, rotary or town twinning meeting...
about people who have gone on sponsored visits, scholarships and exchanges. Track them down and ask them how they arranged to go over, what it cost, who they stayed with. They’ll probably be only too pleased to share their experiences with you. And many towns are twinned with their US namesakes.

Most of us can get to visit the USA one way or another if we are employed (or students with job prospects). It may take a year or so of overtime saving up the money or a couple of long vacations pulling pints in a holiday resort, and if you want to give up smoking or drinking a trip to the USA would be a worthwhile target to save for, and something to get you through the cravings. Some people have even taken to entering competitions as a hobby, and once into the swing of things, they start to recognise what’s required of entries and tie-breaking slogans, winning prizes that can include holiday trips abroad. It’s a long shot, but someone’s going to win that trip for two to Disneyland. It could just be you!

LISTING YOUR INTERESTS IN THE USA

Make your own list, for example:

- touring the sights;
- going on a resort-based family holiday;
- visiting friends or relatives;
- going on a speciality trip (battlefields, bird watching, old cars);
- making a business trip;
- having a look around prior to emigrating.

All are excellent reasons for going to the USA. But if you can make it clear in your own mind why you are interested in the USA then it’ll be easier to answer the essential question:

What do I/we want from our trip to the USA?
You may well be able to combine several concerns:

- visiting family then touring;
- family holiday after a business visit;
- family resort plus personal speciality;
- touring between business visits.

Beware!
Mixing your trips together could ruin the whole thing:

- What would happen if the children got sick while you are all hurrying to the next business appointment?
- Will the children be able to enjoy anything on a rapid, long distance chase between business appointments?
- What will you do if friends not seen for years now chain-smoke, wife swap, play bridge all the time, are workaholics or can’t stand children? However, some considerations can work out just fine:
- If you are geared up to tour you can make your excuses and leave any disastrous reunion.
- If militant chain-smoking friends have now mellowed with children and exercise you can always stay a night longer than planned, or even visit again on your way back to the airport.